My guess would be lifelike botting and not incredibly long hours of it running... Also no long distance... I have mine set in the local square... ~200m radius which is kinda what I do when I play my main account manually. I go to the square and go around the stops, rest, circle again.
We have had some reports of people never tagged, they are cautious about how they bot and dont speak too publicly for obvious reasons about it. Though lifelike and realistic botting is key to safer botting (again within the parameters of safety given botting is never 100% safe)
You know of all people you the bot creator should have hundreds of test accounts putting together a 'ban map' and a 'slash map'. Anecdotal reports from users in these forums are both unreliable and incomplete. Your devs may have already done it and the results confirm that there is no avoidance now and you aren't telling us, or your devs are extremely lazy if they haven't done massive independent variable testing. (example, login catch one mon logout, wait 7 days = Ban or No Ban?) (Example login catch 100 mons in a day wait 7 days = Ban or No Ban?). I am sure you can and perhaps have done a controlled study after each iteration of the bot is released. Either way it doesn't bold well for your business of bots, and the hashing service will be exclusively for map scanning and 'temporary accounts' pretty soon if it isn't already. From a wide array of anecdotal evidence very few accounts using any of the popular botting software(s) survive, it is the same pattern, login do anything (even something simple) wait 4 - 7 days get shadow banned and then perm banned. Rinse Repeat. Niantic seems to randomly allow some accounts to survive for unknown reasons but it has NEVER been correlated definitively to 'humanlike' behaviour. Slashed mons is yet another level of frustration froim the <1% who manage to survive these days and mostly this affects accounts that survived ban waves from months ago but are still getting some of their mons hit by Niantic's audit as they were clearly caught by a bot. What % of accounts that have used your bot in the last month even survive long enough to have slashed mons? I can say with conviction, this will be my last month as a customer until you can give more than the vague unsatisfying answers I have found in these forums to date.
I apologize that we do not come from a land of fairytale where no research is required to be done to release an update within 24 hours past the RE'ing of it and where we are able to beat the odds 100% of the time. You would ask us to delay any such updates for up to 7 days so we could test this all the while having a large majority of the community then at our throats that the bot is down? We try to meet in the middle. As for your comment of "vague and unsatisfying" What would you like us to do? Start monitoring everyone's account to force the information out of them as to how they specifically set their settings to be "lifelike" We have given a multitude of responses to that over the months in here and in discord, your refusal to do some research into the bot that we have let be as customizable as possible in comparison to its original launch is not something we can control. So lets discuss it a bit further: Lifelike means to be human-like or living. This would mean botting every day for 16+ hours for weeks on end is NOT human-like. Logging in and out the next day at EXACTLY the same co-ordinates as you logged out 8 hours ago to a tee, none stop is probably not human-like (at least not in my experience). Going the exact same pace every single day to a tee without fail, is not exactly human-like (try changing up your speeds from time to time), and while we are on the topic of human like, try changing your session times every so often instead of exactly x amount of hours every day. If you are a windows 10 user, ask yourself, did i take a moment to disable computer location if i am going to claim to be playing in Russia while my PC states i am in the USA or where ever? Since our last API update we have had more reports over the last few days of no slashed Pokemon and stability while botting following those simple lifelike concepts. Is there anything I am still apparently being vague about? I just want to make sure we break it down and cover every single aspect of what you might feel to be vague. The PF dev team is far from lazy and it merely takes someone who pops in discord and reads the discussions to see that, Hatching can work an upwords of 18+ hours (at times a few days in a row) when there are major changes that required revamping. Considering the work and support him and any other devs pour into it, I am going to assume you just had no clue about how incorrect and offensive your implication that our devs are lazy just is. Lastly, please allow me to stop you and correct your continued flawed implication that I own this bot, I am simply a customer that started as a volunteer to help others. Just as many others try to do without being considered a part of the team to any extent. Something that people should appreciate, most of us do this because we love the community and want to help, and few get paid as they volunteer. And finally you say it does not correlate to not being human-like? If the actions are human-like, what pray-tell would cause them to flag? Something not natural and human-like is an easy trigger, the one time we saw it was a fault of missing a trap that was not visible until too late, however with the varying options, the various implementations of our hashing or our own bot, to say that human error or lack of human-like actions is unlikely the cause is beyond near sighted, we have made mistakes in past, and when discovered we announce as such and move forward by fixing it. I am shocked at how little this is actually considered especially when it boils down to common sense in many cases. Please understand that non human-like issues are not just isolated to human error, they can be a flaw in coding as was mentioned above in one instant for example. So no I am not claiming that everyone is to blame themselves, there are things that need tweaking on the user side and the product side, and we do our best on both sides of the fence to discover and discuss it.
I think what o.o meant to say is that we are not all as technical as you. what makes common sense to you as you wrote about. I had no clue. I didn't know my laptop had location. I didn't know to change my speed. so I understand what you are saying and we want a tested update. but we also want to know to change speed and location .... I didn't know. can the app do it for us? random speed? can the app change our position within x meter when we signup if we forgot. can the app auto disable location of my laptop. not sure how to do it. I am not upset. I am just trying to translate what o.o said in less aggressive way and to try to offer ideas.
@pinky123 I am sorry that you did not see mention of this in our discord server, as for the location setting thats something myself and another member of the community stumbled upon as of late that seems to help windows 10 users. As for the speed the app cannot do that, however we have discussed this again in great length on our discord channel. The location setting seems to be for windows 10 only (at least as far as I know of, but i only run windows 10). Should you require instructions if you use windows 10 please let me know. As for the tested updates, we do run the updates for a while on a few thousand accounts before we release it, however sometimes, we dont catch things or they dont happen until hundreds of thousands of accounts are doing it. It's all a part of the botters game. Pinky you have at least presented this in a more fair and respectful manner. We do try our best and we are very dedicated, but we can only do so much, most of the time we are pushing to do more than our best. Thank you for at least being respectful.
I am not aware of any system (map or bot or whatever) that is not getting shadowbanned at the moment, including PF. Every map I've seen or used has the same issue of the accounts getting banned after a few hours or days.
The current progress is being announced in Pogodev, as this issue is something affecting everyone and not specific to PF or LM.